XVIII

"You might have thought it no great concern of his--you might have

imagined all our efforts as only a part of a play, and his interest

merely the interest of a looker-on." There was an indignant rasp in

Roger's voice, and he looked across to his father with a protesting

scowl. "He almost made me feel as if I had never learned the alphabet."

David Marshall fixed an intent and anxious gaze on his son's face, and

ran his hand tremulously along the arm of his chair. He knew about how

Roger felt; Truesdale had more than once made him feel the same way

himself.

The old man had remained at home throughout the day. Too ill and nervous

for the store, and too resourceless for the house, he had worried through

twelve hours as wearing as any he could recollect. He had never been more

unfitted for business, yet never (as he made it seem) more demanded by

it. He imagined himself as still the king-pin of the Marshall & Belden

Company--indeed, he found in that belief some consolation for his

difficulty in reconciling himself to the style and title that the course

of the business had finally evolved. He tormented himself with thoughts

of odds and ends of work left over from yesterday or from last week, or

with the apprehension of some fresh step taken, some new course entered

upon by the younger and more ardent men of whom the company was largely

composed. He had laughed more than once over the joke of business

acquaintances who told him they had had to take young men into

partnership because it was impossible to pay the salaries they demanded;

yet something more radical had happened to himself: the young men had not

only come in, but they were showing a disposition to get things into

their own hands. Their former manager, their credit man, several heads

of departments--all these had rallied under Belden, and together seemed

to be trimming the sails to as speculative a course as a craft

essentially conservative in its nature could well be made to take.

Marshall had not formulated so clearly as this the practical primacy of

Belden, but he felt the necessity of his own presence, and chafed under

the temporary withdrawal of his own guiding hand.

But more than the course of affairs at the store, more than the avalanche

of complicated minutiae involved in the progress of the new house, more

than the dawning risks attendant upon Roger's widening operations in

land, more than the amiable persecutions of friends whose ambitions for

him were greater than his own, did the courses of his younger son and all

their threatening consequences disturb his days and harass his

nights--haunting alike the hours set apart for work and for sleep, and

even the few brief intervals between. He would rise in the morning

haggard and dry-eyed after a sleepless night; he would toil through the

weary and perplexing hours of a dragging day; and he would spend his

evenings, usually, in a miserable and solitary contemplation of all his

thickening annoyances and ills.

"Poor pa," Jane would say to her mother, as she watched his bent and

lagging steps moving towards the recess of the bay-window; "there he goes

worrying, all off by himself again."

Her mother, over her sewing or the evening paper, perhaps, would check

the girl's impulse to follow. "Don't chase after your father, Jane; he's

got enough things to bother him already." So that, except for the

occasional charitable moment when Jane, unimpeded, perched on the arm of

his chair and attempted to divert his wearing thoughts from their

ever-deepening channel, the old man spent his evenings largely--too

largely--alone.

The rare visits of Roger, never highly ameliorative, were none the more

so now; the grisly wrestling with realities does little to promote the

exudation of balm. Roger was tough and technical and litigious; his was

the hand to seize, not to soothe.

Roger had had a second and more explicit interview with Truesdale, before

Truesdale had taken an airy and irresponsible flitting from town. He had

also prosecuted various inquiries of his own in various directions, and

these inquiries had resulted in his coming to look up Truesdale's frothy

suggestion with more seriousness, and upon Truesdale himself with more

consideration, if not with more respect--_that_ he still withheld.

"He isn't a complete fool, after all," admitted Roger.

"I never thought he was," responded his father, dully.

"He has some little sense, I acknowledge."

"If it were only common-sense," said the old man, with a mournful,

dragged-out smile.

Roger looked forth streetward, pondering. A long passenger-train shifted

its line of glimmering squares rapidly southward; two or three couples

passed by on the pavement, respiring the suave air of an early June

evening.

"It means money," said Roger, presently.

"As much as is necessary," replied his father, tremulously; "though I

never could spare it worse than now."

"And more--well, more dirty work for me." He thought of the Van Horn

matter, now as good as abandoned. "Never mind, though; I'm getting used

to it."

"You are the only help I have, Roger--the only one to save us from this

disgrace."

There were tears in his eyes, and a feeble tremor ran through the

fore-arm and fingers that he advanced towards Roger's shoulder.

"Father is not the man he used to be," thought Roger. He felt that his

sympathy was largely qualified by the impatience and aversion which must

always move a young man when he observes the first signs of physical and

mental impairment in an older one, and he regretted that it was so. And

he was almost ashamed to feel relieved when his father withdrew his hand.

Besides Roger and his father, only Mrs. Marshall and Jane were at home.

Rosamund was in Wisconsin, and no one was sorry to have her away. She was

a guest of Mrs. Bates at Lake Geneva--the central figure of a

house-party, in fact. Mrs. Bates's fondness for nature did not stop with

flowers; it led her to the fields and woods where they grew. No sooner

was the back of the winter fairly broken than she began to preach the

gospel of country life. She took the cream of June, and left to later

comers the skimmed milk of July and August. She always saw that her

Wisconsin place was ready for her by the middle of May; then for the next

five months she passed back and forth between town and country, according

to the nature of her engagements and the character of the weather.

Truesdale was in Wisconsin, too--but not of the house-party. "You know,

my dear," Mrs. Bates said to Jane, "I had meant to have your brother,

but--"

Jane bowed her head and never thought of venturing to ask her how she

_knew_. That same night Jane slowly tore her plans for the working-girls'

home into long strips and burned them in the gas, one at a time. "Pa'll

never listen to a word about anything like this now."

Truesdale left behind no precise indications of his movements. The only

person to whom he announced anything like a programme was Arthur Fasten,

who met him on the way to the station, with his bag in one hand and his

kit in the other.

"Off, are you?" called Paston. "Don't you begin the season rather early?"

"Just for a few days," replied Truesdale; "a little sketching tour up

North. Change of scene and air, you know."

"Where are you going?"

"Oh, 'most anywhere. I shall be at Bellagio to-morrow, and at Pontresina

the day after. Then I shall dip down towards Scheveningen. And Zante, if

possible--I have always wanted to try Zante." He smiled jovially. "I hear

there's a lovely ruined abbey at Fort Atkinson--everybody does it; and

they say, too, that the capital at Madison is a grand old structure."

He gave a hitch to his light valise and moved on with a diminished smile.

"Of course you've got your Cook's ticket and your meal coupons?" called

Paston, grinning broadly.

"Don't," protested Truesdale, turning back; "you never looked less like a

gentleman."

"I hope your ticket takes in Geneva," said Paston, in no degree offended.

"If it does, I may meet you there; I'm going up to stay over Sunday."

"I can't tell without looking," replied Truesdale; "it's away at the

bottom of my trunk." And he moved on. "Rosy's there, though," he called

back. He did this largely under the promptings of a sense of justice:

Paston was as much entitled to push one project as he himself was to push

another.

"Yes, I know," said Paston.

This ubiquitous and ever-welcome person made his presence known

throughout Geneva with no loss of time. He caused himself to be

remembered by Mrs. Bates for a small dance on Saturday night, and also

secured himself from forgetfulness in connection with her steam-yacht

excursion for Sunday morning. This active and well-intentioned woman was

the prime mover in a poor children's camp which was in process of

construction near the far end of the lake. She could not expect her dozen

young people to take an absorbing interest in her middle-aged

philanthropies; but she knew that an excursion was none the worse for

having an objective point, and she did not feel that she was likely to

please her guests the less by giving a little incidental pleasure to

herself.

"I've got to have something to _do_," she explained to Paston. "I

couldn't be content to come up here and pass the summer in mere

idleness." They were sitting on a pair of camp-stools up near the bow.

Paston, looking backward, saw Rosamund and William Bates together near

the stern.

"It must be a terrible thing to be cursed with ambition and executive

ability," observed Paston. "I'm awfully glad _I_ haven't got any."

"Well, there it is," she responded. "I've got to have something on hand.

I've got to engineer. I've got to manage."

Paston brought back his eyes from William Bates and Rosamund. "Everybody

knows what a capable manager you are." He said this, as he said so many

other things, with a frank and bold directness that made any suspicion of

an _arrière-pensée_ almost an impossibility.

"Well, don't commit yourself until you get there; then you can make your

own observations." She took his remark as almost anybody else would have

felt obliged to take it--just for what it sounded. Nobody understood

better than Paston the deceptive quality resident in a truth plumply

told.

"Shall I see Cecilia Ingles there?" Paston was stopping with the

Ingleses, and had rowed across immediately after breakfast. "I think I

heard them speak about driving down. I say," he added, "it's a rum go for

her."

"I don't see why," rejoined Susan Bates, disputatiously. "She is old

enough to take things seriously; she has got far enough along to begin to

be in earnest. The first thing she asked me was how much money I wanted.

'I don't want any of your money at all,' I told her; 'for such a cause as

this I can scoop up all the money I want by the shovelful. No; what I

want is your personal interest.' That's about the hardest thing _to_ get

in cases like this."

"Well, I believe you've got it," declared Paston, hitching about on his

seat. "She has given up all hope of escaping from you. You're a

tyrant--an inexorable tyrant, she says. She's going to do as you direct."

"All right," returned Susan Bates; "only don't be so sticky about it."

She pronounced this epithet very distinctly and deliberately; she had

long meant to use it with Paston, some time or other--ever since Jane had

imparted it to her, in fact.

"Sticky!" cried the young man. "Me--sticky?"

"Yes--fussy, critical, disagreeable, censorious." She moved her fingers

as if disentangling them from a sheet of fly-paper. "It's one of your own

words, isn't it?"

"Yes, but what it means is stiff, poky, awkward; and nobody else has ever

called me that!"

Susan Bates, with a slight touch of mortification, at once set the whole

matter aside. "Cecilia is good enough at heart," she went on, instantly.

"No, I don't want her money," she ploughed rapidly ahead, "except as a

visitor. Every visitor must give something, and the first must give the

most. You are the first."

"I?" stammered Paston, with an uneasy laugh.

"All of you, I mean." She waved her hand over the whole yacht. "Feel for

your dollars; you will find a contribution-box fastened to the first

tree, at the landing."

"Really?" said Paston, vastly ill at ease.

Susan Bates merely laughed, feeling that she had regained the upperhand.

She had not been so tickled since the day when Minnie Peters had put into

her hands the official notification that she was at length a member of

that obdurate and exacting musical society. "But, poor fellow," she said

to herself, "I mustn't tease him!" She looked back the length of the boat

towards Rosy; Rosy, at the same moment, was looking forward the length of

the boat towards her. A pause had apparently come in William Bates's

careful enumeration of the country-seats which covered the wooded slopes

of either shore. Many of them were the residences of people whom Rosy had

met for the first time during the past winter, and their interest was

therefore biographical as well as topographical. But now the interest, of

whatever kind, was running a bit thinly; Rosy gave a careless word now

and then to another young girl beside her or to a new young man sprawling

at her feet, but her eyes turned every few minutes towards the bow.

"You catch the idea?" Mrs. Bates was saying. "We bring them out on the

train in two hours, and give them a ride on the public steamer to the

camp; we keep them a week. We start in with a fresh lot every Monday

morning, right through the summer."

"Where do you get them?" asked Pasten, making talk industriously. "Do you

set traps for them? Or perhaps you go to the Bureau of Child Labor and

say: So many tons of orphans, to be delivered on the fifth instant, at

nine-thirty A.M., sharp; eh?" He had quite recovered his spirits.

"Get them? Dear me, there are plenty to be got. I expect we shall have to

enlarge the dormitories before the summer is half over."

"And what is Mrs. Ingles to do with them after they _are_ got?" he asked,

with his eye on the foam and bubbles of the wake. "Is she to take the

kinks out of their hair every morning by early candle-light? Is she to

wash all their little porringers and hang them up in rows on their little

hooks? Is she to keep tab when they go in paddling and check them off as

they come out, to see how many have been carried away by the undertow?"

Mrs. Bates declined to consider the undertow. "See; there it is." The

yacht had rounded a small wooded promontory and now approached a shallow

shore, where a gingerly landing was to be effected at a rude and rickety

little pier.

A grove of oak and maple came almost to the water's edge, and within it a

number of barrack-like structures of clean yellow pine were taking shape

and substance. The odor of the pine mingled with the earthy smells of the

grove; now and then a little pile of sawdust was taken swirlingly by the

breeze, and here and there a long, fresh shaving was seen caught upon the

prickly branches of some June rose.

Paston helped Mrs. Bates out on to the pier with a cautious gallantry,

and immediately betook himself to the younger members of the party; he

considered the courtesies due from a guest as now amply accomplished. He

attached himself at once to Rosamund; he helped her over the loose litter

of lumber; he steadied ladders for her at every fresh feint of mounting;

he bestirred himself to a rapacious culling of wild-flowers for the mere

opportunity of tying them together with a shaving. Once he sprinkled them

over with a handful of sawdust, after the manner of a florist

extemporizing a heavy dew. Rosy laughed and nodded, and thrust the

flowers into her belt.

"You will never be serious," she protested.

"Oh yes, I shall. I am always a good deal more serious than people

suppose." He bestowed upon her a look serious enough to match his words.

It was as serious as any one could have wished, and Rosy dropped her eyes

and was distinctly pensive for a minute or two.

Presently the Ingleses came picking their way through the grove in a

surrey. Cecilia Ingles alighted with the air of one somewhat at sea. She

greeted Rosy quite pleasantly, but seemed to be looking about for the

captain. The dry, shrewd, middle-aged face of her husband adjusted its

expression readily enough to the matter before them. He was a born

manager and manipulator. When he could not juggle with a dollar for

profit, he was content to juggle with a penny for pleasure.

Susan Bates hastened up to his wife at once, and kissed her roundly. "So

good of you to come! And on Sunday, too!"

"Never mind," said Ingles; "we can put twice as much on the plate next

Sunday."

Mrs. Ingles at once appropriated William Bates for a walk through the

framework of the unfinished dormitories. Ingles followed with Mrs. Bates.

"Things are going first-rate," declared Susan Bates. "We shall be under

cover in a week, and ready for the painters."

"No plaster?" asked Ingles.

"Dear me, no. Two coats of paint will be quite warm enough."

Rosy, meanwhile, sat upon a pack of shingles under a young maple-tree

which grew within a few steps of the water. Paston lay at her feet and

dug in the sand with a split shingle drawn from the pack, while the other

young people tramped and frolicked with shrill cries through the

dismantled grove and unfinished buildings.

"It was at her house, you remember, that I first met you," said Paston.

He nodded to Mrs. Ingles, who was just moving by with the reluctant

William Bates.

"And a handsome house, too," declared Rosy. "Still, I suppose that hers,

or even Mrs. Bates's, can't be compared with some in London."

"Don't be so sure," rejoined Paston. He thought of "10, King's-gate

Gardens, S. Kensington"; he would have been the last to force a

comparison between that and the town-house of Cecilia Ingles. "A house is

no better for being more than a home," he said, somewhat ruefully.

Rosy was far from subscribing to this. Her ideal home was one that had

been immemorially a palace and a show-place, with troops of servants to

show the troops of tourists through.

"All these places around here are nice enough," she acknowledged,

"but--new. That one over there, now." She pointed across the lake to the

roofs and gables of a large country-seat set on a wooded hill-top. "They

have had to stain it green to make it look old and mossy."

"Sometimes the appearance of age is to be preferred to the reality,"

observed Paston, thoughtfully. His mind was on "Boxton Park, Witham,

Essex," and he was wishing devoutly enough that means were available for

keeping that in a state of fresh repair equal to the state of the house

where he was now staying.

But Rosy was entertaining her own vision of Boxton Park. It was a

spacious and glorious domain, and its noble manor house was a perfect

commingling of old-time picturesqueness and modern comfort. And the

peacocks paraded again on the terrace.

Rosy shifted her seat on the pile of shingles in order to take a more

general view of the landscape. She shrugged her shoulders slightly. "No

lanes, no hedge-rows, no weirs, no coppices..."

"What's the matter with these maples?" asked Fasten, abandoning himself

to the American idiom. "And where are there handsomer elms than right

here in Wisconsin? And what have you against those hills?" He thought of

the wide flatness of Essex; what would not Boxton Park give for a

foothold on such a shore, a prospect over such a sheet of rippling blue?

But Rosy had her own conception of Essex. In some miraculous way it

combined the sweetness of Devonshire, the fatness of Warwick, the

boldness of Westmorland, the severity of Cornwall. And through this

enchanting tract the fox-hounds ever sped in full, re-echoing cry.

Paston gave a sudden dig with his shingle, and a lump of damp sand fell

with a splash far out upon the water. "But, after all, it's dear old

England," he said, plaintively.

"The dearest land in all the world, I'm sure," sighed Rosy,

sympathetically. She dug her toe at a single tuft of coarse grass in the

midst of the sand, and wondered over his "after all."

"Indeed, it is. You would like it, I'm sure."

"I know I should. I shall never be happy until I've seen it."

"But think of me--four thousand miles away from it."

"I do," said Rosy, softly.

"We younger sons," sighed Paston, in a tone of great self-commiseration.

"We younger daughters," echoed Rosy, with an implication that all the

drawbacks were not on one side.

The rest of the party came flocking down to the shore; the Ingleses among

them--to see the others off.

"I suppose you go back as you came?" said Ingles, to Paston.

"Pretty nearly," replied Paston, in the cheery tone he usually adopted

for general converse. And back he went, with this small difference: that

on the return he occupied the place of William Bates.